Vic Chesnutt

I'm really enjoying the new Vic Chesnutt album. He recently signed to Constellation records, and joins up with some of the musicians players of Silver Mt. Zion, Do Make Say Think, all of which I love. I also love Guy Picciotto and everything he has done, and this album has all of them playing along with Vic on what I think is the greatest thing I've heard in a long time. Chesnutt has a certain gauzy focus that bends toward the literary, even for insurgent country music, with songs like "Wallace Stevens" and "Glossolalia." The invited ghosts include "W.H. Auden, Philip Guston and Nina Simone." I feel like there is a powerful interstellar focus to the album, as though Vic Chesnutt's Georgia drawl were somehow being taken over by Sun Ra, that works well with the horns and guitars which quietly spazz-out throughout. There is a strange sense that the album is aimed at the open sky, while retaining a human tenderness, and movement through grief, coping and death. A representative line might be,

"What is the message of those Gamma Rays
that are a-penetratin' you,
do they say that the end
is a-comin' soon?"

There is a picture inside which shows Chesnutt near a couch, presumably in the Hotel2Tango studio, in Montreal, below a large picture of a zeppelin balloon which seems to be decaying, its steel spines jutting out over torn flaps. Below the picture is an old couch which looks like it might be ready to give up the ghost too, and just succumb to the pounds of dust that pack its insides. This captures the mood of the album for me--gloom wearing thinly into joy.